Saturday, November 23, 2013

Three Passions, Two Doubts

I have three passions: Judaism, spirituality, and Murphy, my
Goldendoodle. Of the three the only one I embrace without ambivalence is Murphy.

My ambivalence regarding Judaism has little to do with
Judaism itself and more to do with Jews. I love studying Judaism but often when
I speak to Jews about the potential of Judaism to transform their lives with
new meaning and purpose, I am met with blank stares and apathy. I want to
believe that the reason so many Jews are only nominally engaged in Jewish life
is because the Jewish life they are offered is only nominally engaging. But in
those dark moments when belief gives way to truth I suspect the reason that
most Jews are apathetic regarding Judaism is that they are simply apathetic
toward Judaism. They really don’t care. And because they really don’t care
there is nothing any of us who do care can do about it.

My ambivalence about spirituality is different. Here the
issue isn’t with the people, but the enterprise itself. Spirituality is the
practice of connecting to Reality (God, Tao, or whatever you choose to call
it), but the fact is (and for me it is an experientially confirmable fact)
there is no need to connect to Reality since you cannot be disconnected from
Reality. All the systems we create and organizations we build are, as my Zen
teachers used to say, selling water by the river. The more I travel and teach
ways of awakening to Reality the more I spread the illusion that you need to
awake, that you are asleep.

Perhaps it is the recent death of Toni Packer and my rereading
of her books and those of J. Krishnamurti that has me thinking this way. In any
case, do we really need all the initiations, workshops, mantra, speakers,
gurus, etc.? Is this really the alternative to organized religion that so many
participants claim it is? Or is it just more of the same?

My ambivalence doesn’t keep me from doing the work I do. I
continue to invite Jews into a new Judaism of my own imagining, and I continue
to invite the spiritually independent to learn from the wisdom of the world’s great
spiritual texts and teachers. But I continue to doubt the efficacy of both
efforts.

Thank God for my dog and the simple truth of wagging tails
and chasing Frisbees. While I never answered the koan “Does a dog have
Buddhanature,” I have definitively answered the koan “Is it the Buddha’s nature
to have a dog?